G.O.P. Debate: A Brave Soldier

There were nine Republican candidates on the stage for the Fox News/Google debate Thursday night. Not one of them stood up for an American soldier, Stephen Hill, who was being booed by the audience. Hill appeared by video from Iraq, where he is now stationed; he showed his face and asked this question:

In 2010, when I was deployed to Iraq, I had to lie about who I was, because I’m a gay soldier, and I didn’t want to lose my job. My question is, under one of your Presidencies, do you intend to circumvent the progress that’s been made for gay and lesbian soldiers in the military?

There was a pause, punctuated by jeers from the audience, before Rick Santorum answered. His reply was breathtakingly bad: he talked about dangerous social experiments and what a mistake the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell had been; he didn’t even thank Hill, in a rote way, for his service. But none of the candidates did, and any one of them could have. Throughout the debate, they were more than willing to jump in and interrupt each other; Michele Bachmann broke protocol to quote the assessment of Cuba on the State Department’s Web site, and there were really too many jokes about dogs. But all of them seemed to shrink at this moment, abandoning Hill, who had made himself vulnerable to them and to the world. He was brave to do that; they were cowardly not to defend him. Did they realize that he was a soldier, and a human being, and not some sort of wind-up doll?

Santorum’s answer suggested that he might not:

Yeah. I, I would say any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military. And the fact that they are making a point to include it as a provision within the military that we are going to recognize a group of people and give them a special privilege to, ah, to, to, and removing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, I think tries to inject social policy into the military.

“Sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military”? That will be a surprise to the men and women, of every orientation, who love, marry, and become parents while serving. We have an all-volunteer military whose health relies on its strong ties to civilian life—not a praetorian guard of eunuchs. Does Santorum think that “the military” is a collection of battle scenes in an action movie? Surely not; his father worked for the Veterans Administration, and so he must know better. He also ought to know that there is no “special privilege” here, just the possibility of serving without the special obligation of lying, and the same knowledge other soldiers have that the person they love most might be able to be handed a folded flag if they die. Or is the word “gay” so strong for Santorum that it blotted out the word “soldier”?

It took prodding from Megyn Kelly, one of the Fox moderators, to get Santorum to acknowledge that if Don’t Ask Don’t Tell were reinstated, Hill might be in a difficult situation. His resolution was much like what Rick Perry had to say about Social Security: people in it now might stay, but then all bets are off. And any bad effects were Obama’s fault. There was a lot of blame for Obama in the debate, plus a discussion about whether he was a socialist or the second coming of King George III. There were also many references to Google searches. There wasn’t much of a sense of how people in America live their lives.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.